In the setting described here, joining such clubs conferred considerable status and status was a desirable commodity. That made both attracting and retaining people who by and large had a lot to do much easier. On the other hand, it sounds like they struggled to keep the talkers from talking.
Today I think the situation is reversed. You have essentially no way to generate anything valuable for your members outside of the direct value they get from the club, which is necessarily inversely proportional to their contribution to it. And because specialist knowledge is so much more valuable now, your focus probably has to be on keeping the people who don't want to talk talking rather than shutting up those who would talk to an empty room.
The closest I can name to something like this is toastmasters, which has an aspect of self-improvement that seems to keep it going, or the Rotary Club which provides business connections. Neither (AFAIK) is in a growth period.
They must be aiming for the discourse, rather than their own power though - so that they could pick people hated by themselves or the other members of the club, if those people are bringing something new to the table.
The group has devolved (or evolved) into lots of discussions of ethics in machine learning, online ads, etc. The last two sessions have been entirely centered around philosophy papers.
We've strayed a bit from math but it's a good group to learn with.
I think the choice of a shitty pizza shop is key. It's not popular so we always have room for the whole group of 9, we don't get distracted with exciting food options or drinking a lot. The only thing I don't like is that it's an all male group but hopefully that will change.
I used to be on the board of a local Hackerspace for couple of years. Hackerspaces are sort-of similar places, they encourage a lot of smart people to get together and tinker with stuff. However, in context of interdisciplinary exchange, due to the technology and community focus, there's way too many programmers and way too little beer involved.
If it does work I imagine this is one way to solve the problem.
Noisebridge are true believers in the democratisation of tools - they have workshops and collaborations have at every level of expertise - it is an awesome social good.
Guests were thankful for the knowledge gained and things mostly worked out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gentlemen%27s_clubs_in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Clubs_and_societies_i...
Hackerspaces are wrong -those are educational institutions, not "getting things done" institutions for grownups.
Depends. There's a lot of organizational dissociative identity disorder happening in HSes I know (including ours). On the one hand, people would absolutely like to "get things done". On the other hand, educational outreach is what brings in new people and funding, so it can become the main focus simply out of necessity.